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Aug 08, 2025
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TGIF! President Trump calls on Intel CEO to resign immediately. Tesla plans to disband its Dojo supercomputer team. OpenAI pays bonuses to about 1,000 researchers and engineers.
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President Donald Trump has called on Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign from his position, claiming he has conflicts of interest and “there is no other solution to this problem.” Trump did not provide any evidence to support his claim. Tan was appointed as CEO of Intel in March. The president’s comments come after Republican Senator Tom Cotton this week sent a letter to Intel’s board asking about Tan’s ties to Chinese companies, including investments in firms that Cotton said are reportedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Cotton also cited Tan’s previous role as CEO of software and electronics company Cadence Design Systems, which recently agreed to pay $140 million in penalties for illegally exporting technology to China. In his letter, Cotton referred to funding Intel has received under the federal CHIPS Act, stating that “Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply
with applicable security regulations,” adding that, “Mr. Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.” In a statement to Reuters, a spokesperson for Intel said “Intel and Mr. Tan are deeply committed to the national security of the United States and the integrity of our role in the U.S. defense ecosystem.”
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Tesla is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team as its leader leaves the company, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The team had been building supercomputers powered by in-house chips that help train its vehicles’ self-driving software. Tesla plans to rely more heavily on chips from companies including Nvidia, AMD and Samsung, Bloomberg reported. In July, the electric automaker announced a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to manufacture chips. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said Samsung plans to manufacture next-generation AI6 chips, which are distinct from the Dojo program. Musk has said AI6 chips will go in cars, data centers and Optimus robots. Members of the Dojo team will be reassigned to other data center and compute teams, Bloomberg reported. Tesla and Peter Bannon, the vice president in charge of Dojo who is reportedly
leaving the company, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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OpenAI is paying bonuses to around 1,000 employees on its technical research and engineering teams, or about a third of the company, ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to millions, as the company gears up to release its latest flagship GPT-5 model and faces an ever-rising battle for AI talent, according to a person with knowledge of the bonuses. The size of the bonuses will be determined based on employees’ performance, role and seniority, the person said. The bonuses will vest quarterly over two years and employees have the choice of getting paid in either cash or stock, they said. The bonuses also come as OpenAI looks to hold a share sale for current and former employees that would value the company at $500 billion. The ChatGPT maker has lost a number of researchers to rival Meta Platforms in recent weeks, as the tech giant goes on a hiring spree. In response, OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent a memo to staff earlier this summer promising that the company would respond aggressively to Meta’s poaching efforts.
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President Trump signed executive orders aimed at stopping banks from withdrawing services from customers for their political or religious beliefs, and another that seeks to allow 401(k) holders to invest in alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies and private equity. The orders, signed Thursday, directs regulators to remove references to “reputational risk” and similar concepts from their guidance and examination materials. It also directs the Small Business Administration to make sure banks and other financial firms make reasonable efforts to reinstate customers who were denied services due to “unlawful debanking.” Trump’s family business has sued Capital One for closing its accounts following the January 6 attack on the capital, and Trump this week said JPMorgan and Bank of America refused his business
after his first term as President ended. The cryptocurrency industry had complained about regulators enforcing a wide-scale “debanking” of companies and crypto consumers, particularly after the implosion of FTX and several related bank insolvencies. Private equity firms and other financial institutions have long wanted to tap the vast pool of individual retirement accounts to sell their products. Critics say most investors don’t understand the risks of these products. They argue the products have high fees and that investors would be better off with simpler, lower-cost offerings.
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Meta Platforms has acquired WaveForms AI, a small startup working on artificial intelligence capable of understanding emotion and mimicking it in audio form, The Information reported. The acquisition comes as Meta continues to overhaul its efforts in AI, after stumbles earlier this year. In June, the social media giant hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang as its chief AI officer and agreed to invest $14.3 billion in the data-labeling company. Meta also hired former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and is expected to partially buy out their
venture capital fund, NFDG. WaveForms AI debuted in December and announced a $40 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Alexis Conneau, who worked on audio research at Meta for nearly eight years before leading audio research for OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Coralie Lemaitre, who worked on business strategy for advertising at Google, co-founded the startup.
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